Arduino Class

Join us on August 24th for a 6 week class as we join O’Reilly’s training class. http://training.oreilly.com/arduino/

For those of you that are new to Arduinos:

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. link

What you’ll learn:

• Use Processing to create basic software applications
• Make your own drawing and animation tools
• Create a GUI (Graphical User Interface) to control your software
• Use an Arduino to provide physical controls for your drawing and animation tools

We’d like to find out how many people are coming so if you’re interested, please sign up on our Meetup.com page: http://meetup.com/u/jvS

Antenna Make Night

Next Thursday, July 15th, we will be making amateur radio 2M antennas (half-wave, j-pole). If anyone is interested in learning about antenna theory, soldering, or anything else that goes into making antennas… come down and check it out.

UPDATE: Due to a mixup with our supplier we won’t have the materials to make
antennas until NEXT Thursday, July 15th. We will hold antenna make
night then.

Interlock Lightning Talks at Coworking Rochester: Success!

Thanks to everyone who made it out to our first of hopefully many successful Lightning Talk nights sponsored and hosted by Coworking Rochester.
Special thanks to Dave M. and his crew for their hospitality, as well as Remy D. and the RIT storytellers who recorded most of the talks.

If you missed them, you can watch them on ustream:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/rit-storytellers

Read the rest of this entry »

Interlock Story From Ithaca College

Bryant K from Ithaca College came up to visit and interview some of the members about hacking, Interlock, and the scene.

Check out his video and great blog post.

Link

Interlock Lightning Talks at Coworking Rochester – Friday, May 14th!

On Friday, May 14th, we will be co-hosting our monthly lightning talk event at Coworking Rochester in Downtown Rochester. Coworking Rochester has recently expanded their location, and we’re looking forward to working together to establish a common community of people who appreciate collaborative, open environments for both work and play. If you haven’t stopped by Coworking Rochester lately, this event would be a perfect time to come check them out.

The event will begin at 7pm and will include refreshments and a series of 2-5 minute lightning talks about a variety of subjects. Everyone is welcome.

Want to give a lightning talk? Get in touch with us at info at interlockroc dot org, so we can get an idea on how many people are interested in presenting. If you’re sure you’d like to give a talk, let us know by Tuesday, May 11th. If your presentation includes slides, we need your slides by Thursday, May 13th. The event will be opened up at the end for additional, unplanned talks if time permits; but your advanced planning would be greatly appreciated and will guarantee you a timeslot.

This event should be a blast, and we hope to see you there!

Open Mate, Beta 2

Two long weeks ago, we finally scrounged the equipment and ingredients necessary to iterate Hack Pittsburgh’s Open Mate recipe. Personally, I hadn’t heard of this odd Club Mate beverage until I saw the recipe, but — being a homebrewer — I couldn’t help but to order a case (for comparison purposes only, of course) and hunt down some yerba maté and caffeine powder of my own.

With said ingredients in hand, we put three gallons of water on the hot plate during one of our Tuesday open nights (come visit!), and proceeded to spend three hours hovering around the kitchen area, waiting for it to get anywhere near boiling. The tea was brewed, sugared, cooled, and kegged with the following specifications:

Ingredients

• 3 gallons of water
• 3oz yerba mate tea
• 2c sugar
• juice of 0.5 lemons
• 0.5t citric acid

Procedure

• bring water to just under a boil
• add tea to water (I put the tea in a big homebrewing grain bag, effectively creating a huge teabag)
• steep for six minutes
• remove tea
• add sugar, lemon juice, citric acid
• cool, pour into a keg, carbonate at 20psi

You’ll notice we skipped the caffeine this time. Personally, I’m more concerned with flavor than (added) stimulants, so I never bothered tracking down a scale sensitive enough to measure out one or two grams of powder. Feel free to add that in when you’re adding the sugar (check out Hack Pittsburgh’s recipe for the correct measurements and warnings).

Yum?

We finally got to do some beta tasting this past Thursday, and all testers agreed that it was yummy and pretty faithful to the original product. I have since sat down for a more in-depth side-by-side comparison (not double-blinded, mind you), and I feel our recipe — although quite tasty — has come up a bit short compared to the real deal. The sweetness is spot on, but there is a complexity and depth to the tea flavor that is missing in our beverage. So I think we’ll try some things differently next time:

• adding lemon was a mistake: I was hoping to avoid uncommon ingredients like citric acid, but alas, you should go out and get some (cream of tartar was a pretty popular substitute in old-timey ginger beer recipes)
• more citric acid: fizzy tea is pretty dull without a bit of acid zing. We should probably at least double it next time, but further experimentation is in order
• increase the tea input: I’m hoping part of the depth-of-flavor difference is merely a matter of strength
• caramelize some of the sugar first: Club Mate has added coloring. Hopefully caramelizing some of the sugar will make Open Mate less pale, and also improve flavor.

Any other ideas? I can’t wait to work through our first three gallons, so we can start brewing the next version. Bottoms up!

Success.first_friday + Success.barcamp_roc

This past weekend was a lot of fun and a whole lot of awesome for Interlock. Thank you to all of the members and supporters of Interlock who spread the word throughout the crowd during our First Friday and Barcamp showings. During First Friday, we managed to impress (and maybe scare) a few visitors by inviting them inside the space and showing off our environment. At BarcampRoc, our set of Interlock Lightning talks went great. Our members did a great job of outlining hackerspace activities: soldering, DIY networking, arduino-powered inventions, and making skills! Thank you to everyone who presented and everyone who showed up to support us.

Thursday should be a fun night. Make/Programming night begins at 8pm. If you haven’t stopped by yet, or haven’t checked us out lately, take this opportunity to swing by and hack along.

First Friday / Barcamp This Weekend

This Friday, Interlock and the rest of the Hungerford building will open as part of the First Friday art exhibit. If you haven’t visited during a First Friday you can expect a good time to meet other members of Interlock and explore the building looking for some interesting art and people.

Also this Friday, Interlock will be hosting the Rochester 2600 meetings. An info sec interest group.

This Saturday we’ll be attending Barcamp Rochester. This is an event at RIT that a lot of people will be attending. The idea is anyone can attend but you must participate by doing a talk.

Check out our calendar for times and other events going on.

Linux Workshop This Weekend

We are holding a Linux Workshop this Saturday, March 20 from noon to 4PM.

If you’ve never been to the Linux Workshops in the past they’re a lot of fun and a great way to learn something new!  Everyone is welcome!

Experts will be on hand to help with any Linux questions or problems you might have. So bring in your computer and let us help you get the most out of it. Or come and answer questions for others.

Python Night

This evening Interlock had the pleasure of hosting the Rochester Python Meetup, and by all accounts it was a total success!

Things kicked off with a great presentation from the OLPC Video Chat team from RIT, who are working to build a video chat system for the XO using Python.  The XO is a low-cost, durable computer designed for children, part of the OLPC project.  OLPC Video Chat, or OVC, will enable children to communicate with one another over the network using sign language.

After the presentation there was a lot of Python, programming, and technology related discussion.

Interlock hosts a weekly, and more general, MAKE/Programming night that is open to all and starts at 7pm, but we’re looking forward to hosting the Python meetup on a monthly basis!